And later on I was going to learn about what she knew about, then—about what it’s like when the person you love dies..and you’re the one responsible. I was going to learn that if you were the devil—I mean if you were the very incarnation of all those mythologies of evil—if you were that, and you wanted to design the worst possible thing you could do to someone wonderful..that’s what you would come up with. You’d sit in your cave, scheming, and after you’d exhausted a whole bunch of petty torments, and after you’d grown bored with the dialectical ins and outs of manslaughter versus murder versus accidental death..you’d come up with someone killing the person they love. It just doesn’t get any better than that. You’d take someone who was completely alone, who needed, more than anyone you could find, the company of others—of a particular other. Then you’d design that other person to be perfect for them. Then you’d put them together, and you’d quench their loneliness with each other. Then they’d fall in love. And they would become one. Then you would have one of them kill the other, by accident.
To kill your brother in a car accident—I don’t know. It must have been especially terrible that it wasn’t "that bad of an accident". They hit this car. Jules walks away. I mean she doesn’t even go to the hospital. She’s fine. They were just going down Lexington, this other car tried to make a left. It was a U-Haul, she said. Jules didn’t even hit the window. They were both wearing seatbelts.
And you walk away—and your brother doesn’t get up. Never gets out of that car, not without help. And the last thing you ever wanted to say to him—doesn’t get said. Never will. It’s a one-sided goodbye. One of you is here. One of you is gone.
You have to call people in those moments, too. You have to do a few normal things, while the last of your world sinks away. You have to call your parents—in Jules’s case. You have to tell one person the news—hopefully the one person who you can count on to tell everyone else the news. That way, you only have to make one phone call.
I can see Jules at 58th and Lex, probably holding onto her brother for dear life. Until someone grabs her and takes her away from him. And she’s sitting on the curb. And she’s looking up at the glassy towers there. A Payless. A Victoria’s Secret. The Container Store. Asking them why did this have to happen today.
You can’t do anything in situations like that. The firemen, and the ambulance, and the police take over. All the civil systems that we’ve put in place to deal with the details of such things. They take over and deal with the details—you don’t have to bury your own dead—and so you’re useless, in the very event that has most to do with you.
All you have to do—in Jules’s brother’s case—is die.
And for the other person, you look at your friend, or your mother, or your son, and there’s part of you that didn’t know they could do that, or didn’t believe they could. But there it is. They did. And now you’re left—to what? When the only thing you want to do..is go with them.